Literary Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson

[caleb72]

Just finished. So good. So so good.

[Bookpossum]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

There seemed to be two main themes of discovery in the book: one based on Nora's self-awareness and the other based on gender stereotyping. Does anyone know if Ibsen's play was the inspiration for the main character's name of Nora?

I was just reading through the various comments again and picked up that no-one had responded to your query Bookworm_Girl. I don't know if that was the case, but it could well be. In a way, Jessica Anderson explored what happened to Ibsen's Nora after the front door closed and she went out to try to live her own life. At the end of the 19th century, it would have been even tougher than it was for Nora Porteous.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I was just reading through the various comments again and picked up that no-one had responded to your query Bookworm_Girl. I don't know if that was the case, but it could well be. In a way, Jessica Anderson explored what happened to Ibsen's Nora after the front door closed and she went out to try to live her own life. At the end of the 19th century, it would have been even tougher than it was for Nora Porteous.

I'm very sorry I missed your comment Bookworm Girl.

I was reminded very much of A Doll's House as I read the book. Like Bookpossum, I don't know if Anderson actually had Ibsen in mind but she was certainly thinking on parallel lines.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Thanks, Bookpossum and fantasyfan! I wouldn't be surprised if she did, but I didn't find anything that confirms so.

[caleb72]

I've never read the Lady of Shalott and I read a quick overview of what the poem was about so I could understand what parallels there might be in the novel.

Well - quite a few really!

The eventual revelation of Sir Lancelot in the final pages brought a contented sigh from me as I read. Her globe of memory finally resting on that one dark side that she has never explored. Wonderful!

I loved Nora. She seemed so real to me. I really felt like I was inside her head and sifting through those memories she might previously have flinched away from. Her bitterness, her weaknesses ended up being precious to me as I progressed. This is another novel that demonstrates that a book can be engrossing without having any "action". I felt the same after reading Remains of the Day.

[Bookpossum]

Yes, I loved the ending, where the memories finally come back to her and she is able to complete the puzzle.

Nora was very real to me too. I found the book very sad because of the life she led, which represented the limited opportunities available to most women of her time, my mother among them.

There is also the consideration of the path not taken, as she contemplates the beautiful embroidered wall hangings she had made in her youth.

Who knows what else I may have drawn ... out of the compression of a secret life.

A beautiful book and one I look forward to rereading before too long.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I read in a book this morning a discourse that memory is fluid and shifting and is not static like viewing a collection of snapshots in an album. It contained this statement below.

The Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that each memory consists not only of itself but of all subsequent recollections of it.

It made me think of the following quotes from Nora regarding the mutability of her memories. We all must doubt at times the reliability of our memories from the passage of time, from the aggregate of our life experiences affecting our views, from the overlay of people telling us their perspectives of what happened at the same event, etc.

I consider regret, even shock at the realization of how we had wasted each other. And because I can still ask the question, I must ask another. Have I given an accurate account of Colin Porteous, or have I merely provided another substitute? At number six our speculation on the roses always ended in laughter...

Perhaps the real man has been so overscored by laughter that he will never be retrieved. As a rule, when we can’t find even one good quality in a person, we are prejudiced, and by that rule I must admit my prejudice.

Yet her memories of Arch stay in the dark side and aren't revisited in discussions at number six.

But I never did so, and Arch stayed on the dark side, and now I can be glad that he was never overlaid by the discussion, speculation, and humour that will always bring uncertainty to my view of Colin Porteous.

I liked this quote near the ending.

My globe of memory is in free spin, with no obscure side, and although at times in its swelling and spinning it offers the queer suggestion that imagination is only memory at one, or two, or twenty, removes, my interest now is in repudiating, or in trying to repudiate, those removes, even if it ends by my finding something only as small as a stone lying on pale grass.

[Bookpossum]

Great points Bookworm_Girl. The unreliability of memory is fascinating, especially the way things change in family stories with the retelling.

[HomeInMyShoes]

I have no idea when I'll get to this. I've got a hold request for the copy from the library now though.

[Bookpossum]

Good luck with getting it soon. It's quite short so won't take you long to read, but so good!

So I just finished this. With the author and book unknown to me I did not wish to spend the money on buying the ebook and so requested the paper book through my local library. That system did not have the book so I had to wait for a special request out of the Chicago library system. So anyway . . .

First this was a pleasure to read just from the quality of the writing. On that I agree with everyone. The paper book I read really did not have any discussion about the book. None coming from the author nor any coming from a knowledgeable critic whose judgment I should be expected to defer to. As to considering the latter I prefer to read a book and form my own opinions, to let the book mean what it means to me without being told I'm wrong. So with that offered my analysis differs somewhat what others have said here.

First I have read Dolls House and do not really see the clear parallels that others here say they see. Specifically I do not see that Nora's character was significantly altered by the experience of her marriage. Nor that here marriage was the source of her unhappiness or feelings later in life that she had been denied happiness. Her longing for a bright future that never materialized was there before she even met her husband, continued during her marriage, and because she was not really married for that long, continued for the greater part of her life which occurred subsequent to her divorce. Just as an aside I read the section from how she first met her husband (she found herself attracted to his father actually, rushed off in confusion, and on return found that the father was gone and her eventual husband was there) through their divorce twice to try and understand it. Little explanation was provided as to why she married him. In her account there never seemed to be much indication that she ever felt any great love for him. In fact through out her life other than that marriage as far as emotional and sexual intimacy she preferred men who were for one reason or another just not available for that; gay, not interested, or married. Before, during, and after her marriage.

I'd go further and say that I wonder if anything would have made her happy in life. She really seemed to always be an emotionally distant person with everyone through out her life.

I also had a different take on the meaning of the Lancelot fantasy. In particular with respect to the ending where it recurs. I wish I had the ebook so I could quote the final two paragraphs here but it would mean having to type it all out. However, the mention of that seems to be to be conflated with the recollection of her long suppressed memories of her father, his death, and funeral. That loss when she was so young having much to do with how her character and life turned out.

[caleb72]

I've been wanting to dump some additional thoughts here, but was not really checking in that much over the last week. I was thinking about the The Lady of Shallot in relation to this novel. I don't really know much about the poem, having never read it. However, I read a brief on what it was about.

The Lady of Shalott is a magical being who lives alone on an island upstream from King Arthur's Camelot. Her business is to look at the world outside her castle window in a mirror, and to weave what she sees into a tapestry. She is forbidden by the magic to look at the outside world directly. The farmers who live near her island hear her singing and know who she is, but never see her.

The Lady sees ordinary people, loving couples, and knights in pairs reflected in her mirror. One day, she sees the reflection of Sir Lancelot riding alone. Although she knows that it is forbidden, she looks out the window at him. The mirror shatters, the tapestry flies off on the wind, and the Lady feels the power of her curse.

An autumn storm suddenly arises. The lady leaves her castle, finds a boat, writes her name on it, gets into the boat, sets it adrift, and sings her death song as she drifts down the river to Camelot. The locals find the boat and the body, realize who she is, and are saddened. Lancelot prays that God will have mercy on her soul.

There's some strong parallel's between the poem and the novel; trapped in the house, seeing a different world through the window (from a certain angle), the tapestries etc..., but there were some other elements I thought were interesting to explore.

Firstly, the Lancelot image seems to be an image which haunts Nora. We find out later what the image means, but is the image the real reason why she breaks out from her prison?

Also, the journey of the Lady is meant to be to her death, but here we see something different. I might argue that Nora's life remains "unlived" to some extent. This might be somehow tied in with how she treats memories - everything bad to the dark side of her moon, where it's never really dealt with. Eventually, she really does start to deal with everything, but only when she is back in her prison. I tend to think this suggests an enlightenment that could have come earlier - but that did come.

Nora's attempted suicide is, I guess, the possible ending that was narrowly averted.

The contrast I see is between Nora and Dorothy. Dorothy seems to be a kindred spirit to Nora - trapped in a town, walking as if testing the boundaries of her prison. She does not break out in the same way that Nora does, but although the appearance is that she is happy with her wonderful husband and children, the reality is, at the end, a grim one.

Where was Anderson going with this contrast? Both looked like they started in the same prison. The connection with the poem makes one think that Nora might be leaving to her death - and almost does - but survives. Dorothy, never escapes her prison, but the prison doesn't equate to safety and she ends herself and nearly all of her family.

Did anyone get any of this? I admit that I only considered it once I'd completed the book and looked up the poem. I possibly should have read about that first, but that's me, ignoring the references until later.

[Bookpossum]

I saw Nora as lacking any belief in herself and her abilities, and trapped in that situation all her life. Trapped also of course by the situation of most women of her generation - not educated, not given equal pay for equal work, not expected to be able to achieve anything.

Tell people how stupid and hopeless they are and you can crush their self-confidence very quickly. It needs a very strong and confident character to overcome those odds.

Hamlet, I think she married her husband because he asked her and she saw it as a way of escaping what she saw as her dead-end life. But of course she took the prison with her, and it was her bad luck that she got such a poisonous man. Mind you, she wouldn't have thought she deserved anyone decent. And perhaps that explains why the men she knew were indeed not available: gay, not interested or married, as you point out.

I like your comparison of Nora and Dorothy, caleb72. Perhaps showing that all sorts of things can lurk beneath the surface, even when things appear to be happy, and that this was a road down which Nora might have gone, but did not.

[fantasyfan]

Here are a few random thoughts that your excellent posts have inspired.

In the poem, Launcelot is the heroic image of a reality that destroys false values and illusionary goals. He bursts into the Lady's life and the world changes:

She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

The "curse" is that the Lady of Shalott has been so long in a self-contained prison that she cannot now adapt; she can only die. In the novel Dorothy dies--but not in the passive sorrowing way of Tennyson's Lady, but in a savage doomed assault on the "Four gray walls, and four gray towers" of her life.
Nora lives but like the Lady is unable to find a new and powerful meaning to her life and like her she drifts drifts helplessly away into the future.

Tennyson closes the poem with Launcelot.

Who is this? and what is here?
And in the lighted palace near
Died the sound of royal cheer;
And they cross'd themselves for fear,
All the knights at Camelot:
But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, "She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott"

Does anyone mourn Dorothy or Nora?

[Bookpossum]

Great post, fantasyfan! And you end with a really interesting question.